In a fluid higher education landscape that is reactive to executive orders and state legislation, adjustment is the name of the game.  

The current federal administration desires to reduce Antisemitism while simultaneously dismantling the very offices that used to track and respond to discriminatory incidents and whose statements, councils, and programming supported religious pluralism.  

Lack of support for religious students has been an unfortunate and unintended casualty of the hyper charged, polarized political environment in which we find ourselves.  

How can campuses be proactive in supporting religious and nonreligious students in this new landscape?  

The current higher education climate is marked by compliance and quick pivots, with many campus leaders seeking to stay ahead of anticipated moves, comply with government directives, and avoid the spotlight. Seemingly, students are afterthoughts as it is not always evident who remains committed to the student learning experience. The federal government? State legislators? The campus? What if there was a way to center both: alignment with external stakeholders and student learning? 

Most college and university missions have a social or public good mission to increase access to higher education and prepare students for the careers of tomorrow, with the skills to solve pressing local and global challenges. Employers have long hailed the importance of soft skills to 21st Century jobs and prized adaptability and interpersonal skills in the workforce. Students’ ability to productively navigate value differences from global worldviews is a key skill that does not appear to be minimizing in importance anytime soon — whether in the board room, in the design and implementation of public health or engineering initiatives, or in domestic or international relations. 

At the same time, student development theory tells us that students set foot on college campuses as multidimensional humans: they are more than their ability, citizenship, ethnicity, language, race, or religion, though these are important to students’ sense of belonging. Students experience their campus as either welcoming or hostile, supportive or obstructive to their thriving and success as students. Research has shown that this varies with students’ religious background and with the unique campus environments they encounter.  

There exists an opportunity to support students in their multidimensionality and develop their ability to engage constructively with the religious pluralism they encounter at college. In doing so, campuses can develop students’ interpersonal skills and ability to work together with people who will become their colleagues, neighbors, collaborators and competitors on the world stage. 

An assessment tool called the INSPIRES Index offers a way forward to identify institutional structures and behaviors that campuses can assess to support the belonging of all students on campus. 

The INSPIRES Index was developed to support a welcoming climate for all learners and aligns with campuses’ efforts to reduce Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and discrimination of religious and nonreligious students alike. With generous support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and more recently the Pew Charitable Trusts, INSPIRES was designed by Drs. Matthew J. Mayhew and Alyssa Rockenbach at The Ohio State University and North Carolina State University, respectively.  

They found that efforts to make campuses more welcoming for religious groups increased the welcome all students felt: when students saw other worldviews being treated with dignity in and out of the classroom, it increased their sense that their own perspective would be honored and reinforced a sense of belonging.  

The tool is free to campuses and supports the belonging and success of all students, including Atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, Evangelical, Hindu, Indigenous, Jewish, Mainline Protestant, Muslim, and secular students.  

INSPIRES offers research-backed assessment on seven domains of campus life including academics, co-curriculars, and efforts to reduce negative engagement, but here we focus on the domains of institutional structures and behaviors that research has shown to be within institutions’ control to impact the student experience.  

Institutional structures refer to the presence of structures and support available to all students, such as counseling, career advising, wellness, residence life, and health center staff sensitive to students’ existential struggles, religion, or spirituality. These complement multifaith spaces for support and expression that uphold students’ freedom and equality in practicing their religion 

Institutional behaviors, on the other hand, are the actions campuses take to support the flourishing of multiple worldviews and perspectives, including the collection of survey and focus group data on demographics and the student experience, providing education to faculty, staff, and students, and the establishment of feedback loops with representative councils and committees to and from administration. Such institutional behaviors work in tandem with efforts to reduce negative engagement through the creation of policies, procedures, and incident reporting and response systems that are designed with all students in mind and that refrain from privileging any particular religious or nonreligious affiliation.  

Institutional structures and behaviors, like the other domains assessed by the Index, are areas where campuses have agency to shape the campus climate and the student experience.  

Interfaith America has partnered with INSPIRES to offer the Index as a needs assessment tool in working with individual campuses and provides post-assessment implementation guidance for campuses who use the Index. 

Rather than fearing the possibility of a religiously tinged incident on campus, INSPIRES empowers campus leaders to be proactive in assessing and evaluating current practice and making informed adjustments that support the success of all students. It offers a way forward for campuses seeking to lead with mission and values to make intentional adjustments that uphold freedoms of religion and expression for all students. And it does so publicly, meeting the increasing demands of federal and state legislators’ interpretations of free speech on campus, mandates for openness to all viewpoints, and cries for public accountability. 

The Index serves Evangelicals as much as Muslims; combats Antisemitic as much as Islamophobic expressions of prejudice on campus; and accounts for the silencing of minority religious perspectives and the self-censoring that Christian students report in the classroom.  

Indeed, using the Index responsibly has the potential to inform and reform while bringing people together – the heart of pluralism, the lifeblood of a democratic society.